Never ending staircase

Every wondered how those illusions of never ending staircases were made? Here's how!

Photo restorations are my speciality but today I thought I would create a tutorial on making a never ending staircase from Photoshop. Textured with wood, stone grass or whatever you choose.

Create a document in photo shop around 4000 x 2000 pixels. File / new / and fill in the pixels width and height.

We need to show the rulers and change to centimetres.

View / rulers Then right click on the now visible ruler and select centimetres.

We need to show the gird now. View / show grid

Now go to View / Snap to / Grid, to make sure the lines we draw are all consistent.

To check that your screen settings are the same as mine go to edit / preferences / unit and rulers

copy these setting.

Back to the image.

On a new layer draw with the polygon lasso tool from the tools palette, a diamond. Use 5x3 squares per quarter to draw your diamond shape. This gives us an angle of just about 30 degrees which is very important for this to work.

On new layers, draw the other two shapes as per the image above. Now merge the layers. Select the freshly drawn layers in the layers palette and merge them using Layer / merge layers.

Copy the layer and paste and repeat this and arrange the steps as the image below.

Select all these layers in the layers pallet and duplicate them all. Right click in the layers palette and select, duplicate layers. With the layers still selected flip them. Edit / transform / flip hirozontal. Use this process by ordering your layers and copying and pasting to get the result below.

Now letís use something to make to the steps look more real.

Find a picture of a stone slab or a piece of wood, plastic, metal or even grass and cut it out into the shape we first drew, (the diamond and its edges). You can do this on a separate layer and change the opacity of the layer in your layers palette so you can see the original diamond step underneath. Using wood this can be achieved fairly easily. You may need to use the warp or scale tools, or liquefy (sorry I wonít be explaining how to use these tools here - but search the net I am sure you find what you are looking for)

Now repeat the steps we used to create the stair case and position your steps above the others and you will have your staircase. Now use it creatively! You can experiment with amount of steps just by shortening the sides of the stair case using the grid we first set up.

Here is one in stone! I created this myself with some stone slabs and some cleaver cloning and shading.

Thanks dbrodie, the shadow was simply added as another layer. I started with the stair case and turned it black and white, using the hue/sat/lightness slider. Then I warped it using warp. The rest was done simply be deleting or adding to the shape thinking hard how the light would fall over the rocks. I have a good perception of the world and this was done purely on knowledge of how shadows fall around different shaped objects and of course what looks natural.

I then lowered the opacity of the layer and played with the layer blending modes to fins out which gave the best result.

Cool tutorial, I really like the cast shadow you added beneath the staircase on the beach, maybe you can do a tutorial on how you did that as well? It almost looks like you used a displacement map? The shadows follow the rock's contour really nicely.

Thanks joeyman11 great tip for everyone who is trying this out. If they feel they need more blurred stones they can use blur. There are larger version of these images on the net which should show in better detail the workmanship